In short, difficulty isn't the only reason why people are having trouble with content. If anything I think for a lot of people the issue is logistics more than anything else. People always talk about the low pop realms but no one seems to care about the realms where faction balance swings wildly back and forth which affects progression as well.

This is a prime example of why LFR is necessary. Without it, even the "regular" raiders would be hard pressed to see any content.

Non-LFR raiding is now and has always been a niche. You can believe that Blizzard catering to that group was what raised subscriptions during BC if you like. It's non-intuitive, overly simple and flies in the face of other phenomena such as game age, a changing game culture, the rise of many other MMO's many of them F2P etc. Not to mention there have never been enough raiders in the game to explain much of anything at all regarding mass subscriber movement. The point is ALL of these things have an effect and the reason the game isn't growing at the moment is largely because it has been difficult to attract brand new customers to an eight-year-old game that costs $100+ dollars a year to subscribe to in the US/EU as well as additional costs for expansions, etc. This also leaves out the most significant barrier to new customers which is the normal non-sale cost to start from the beginning.

The 'casual experiment' has been on since 2005 in fact since WoW was a casual alternative to EQ to start with. If non-casual MMO's were thought to be highly profitable and competitive, I'm guessing that we would be seeing one out there somewhere doing big business. The fact that there isn't really any competition of this nature in the US/EU markets should tell you something.

Believe what you like. There are actual observable facts regarding those companies that wish to compete in this market that don't line up with your beliefs.

Actually the only other sub based MMO released in the last 5 years or so that could come close to be called a success was Rift, a game that definitely did cater to the hardcore.

There are obviously a lot of factors in sub numbers, but when you look at the subscription graph, its kind of shocking how it just flatlines as soon as wotlk hits after ridiculous growth prior to that. It was not a slow, gradual run off where many things slowly ate away at it. It was a very sharp, sudden halt to the growth. And to me the single biggest difference between wotlk and BC game design was that in many aspects, not just raiding, the game catered much more to casuals, which is why I attribute the decline to that.

Notice the flatline in late 2008 when wotlk was released:

---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 06:27 PM ----------

Originally Posted by ihyln

The same hardcore raiders have grown up, got jobs, married, and had kids. So unless you pretend that the players in WoW live in some kind of bubble your analysis is so far off it may as well be on Mars

And you really don't think there is any other likeminded players in the entire world to replace them?

Actually the only other sub based MMO released in the last 5 years or so that could come close to be called a success was Rift, a game that definitely did cater to the hardcore.

Rift failed precisely because it catered to the hardcore. They admitted they overtuned Hammerknell. They now have just a few percent of WoW's activity. I doubt the game has much of a future.

There are obviously a lot of factors in sub numbers, but when you look at the subscription graph, its kind of shocking how it just flatlines as soon as wotlk hits after ridiculous growth prior to that. It was not a slow, gradual run off where many things slowly ate away at it. It was a very sharp, sudden halt to the growth. And to me the single biggest difference between wotlk and BC game design was that in many aspects, not just raiding, the game catered much more to casuals, which is why I attribute the decline to that.

You continue to be stuck on ceteris paribus stupid. Endgame difficulty is not the only way the two situations were different. BC was released into a market that was less saturated than the one Wrath hit. Subs could not continue to grow to infinity; why couldn't Wrath have been the place where saturation was achieved? And the experience in Cataclysm disconfirmed the Big Lie that difficulty was the problem: they tuned difficulty up, and the losses got much worse.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

You continue to be stuck on ceteris paribus stupid. Endgame difficulty is not the only way the two situations were different. BC was released into a market that was less saturated than the one Wrath hit. Subs could not continue to grow to infinity; why couldn't Wrath have been the place where saturation was achieved? And the experience in Cataclysm disconfirmed the Big Lie that difficulty was the problem: they tuned difficulty up, and the losses got much worse.

Just as a little aside, do you realize how foolish you make yourself look when you resort to insults like that? Honestly...I feel like i'm talking to a 3rd grader with stuff like that. Prior to you saying that I though you were defensive and hostile, but at least level headed. Now I feel like you're not even worth my time to respond.

LFR ruins the feel for me when I do normal mode raids, since I feel like "I've already done this and facerolled it 10times before I've even been geared enough to try it with its intended difficulty"

Listen carefully. If you don't have the time or desire to do NM or HM raiding, then LFR is for you. It's not a step towards anything, for you it's the only kind of raiding you have time for. However, if you DO want to do NM/HM raiding, then you never need to set foot in LFR:

- My guild cleared all of MSV the first week it opened, which was before LFR was even available. It was completely doable in heroic blues and dropped better gear than LFR obviously. HoF and Terrace could be done in a mix of MSV gear and a few slots still in blues. Sure it was nice if you got really lucky and LFR dropped a piece for a slot you couldn't get from NM/HM kills but that was actually pretty unlikely considering the drop rates in LFR, you'd probably gear that slot faster in NM/HM on average.

- Now that ToT is out, if you are a NM/HM raider then you should have a mostly complete set of gear from the last tier. Any heroic piece will beat out any crap from the new LFR. And like all raids NM ToT is tuned for people in NM gear from the previous tier. So you do not NEED a single piece of LFR gear to start getting NM ToT gear (and eventually HM as well). And again, current tier LFR drop rates are so low you'd be pretty damn lucky to get an upgrade from LFR before one from NM especially since LFR only started unlocking a week after NM. LFR ToT is only 502 vs. 496 from NM HoF/Terrace so it's a minor upgrade in any case.

LFR is there for two reasons. It's so people who don't have time to raid NM/HM can still do some raiding. It also gives gear that might be a slight upgrade for NM raiders (not HM raiders though) so that if those people DO want to do LFR they still get some benefit out of it. But it absolutely is not necessary.

---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 11:50 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Fullgore

I don't like how justice point are close to useless now

I do agree with that. Can't say I like what they did with VP gear.

---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 11:58 PM ----------

Originally Posted by muchtoohigh

There are obviously a lot of factors in sub numbers, but when you look at the subscription graph, its kind of shocking how it just flatlines as soon as wotlk hits after ridiculous growth prior to that. It was not a slow, gradual run off where many things slowly ate away at it. It was a very sharp, sudden halt to the growth. And to me the single biggest difference between wotlk and BC game design was that in many aspects, not just raiding, the game catered much more to casuals, which is why I attribute the decline to that.

Notice the flatline in late 2008 when wotlk was released:

That's what gamers are like, either it's AMAZING and EVERYONE IS PLAYING IT or it SUCKS and NOBODY PLAYS THAT GAME OMG WHAT A NOOB. Look at the Everquest graph, it's pretty much the same. Ultima Online looks similar only it never got very high and was slow to start as well.

Honestly, the one completely dominant factor that drowns out everything else is that WoW is OLD. What can you even compare it to? How many games can convince ~10m players to pay $15 a month after 8 years? It's hard to diagnose anything because it's unprecedented.

Actually the only other sub based MMO released in the last 5 years or so that could come close to be called a success was Rift, a game that definitely did cater to the hardcore.

There are obviously a lot of factors in sub numbers, but when you look at the subscription graph, its kind of shocking how it just flatlines as soon as wotlk hits after ridiculous growth prior to that. It was not a slow, gradual run off where many things slowly ate away at it. It was a very sharp, sudden halt to the growth. And to me the single biggest difference between wotlk and BC game design was that in many aspects, not just raiding, the game catered much more to casuals, which is why I attribute the decline to that.

Very likely much to your surprise -- -- I agree with almost all of this. We could parse out the meaning of the word 'success' with regard to Rift but it's still up and running and I play it during my WoW planned vacations [about two-three months a year on average]. If it was meant to compete on a subscription basis with World of Warcraft it's probably failed that test (since we don't really know anything about their numbers other than population observations based on shards, etc.) but it's done well enough and continued to bring out fresh stuff to play with for a while now. Which is fine because I suspect that, plus the Cataclysm debacle, is what got Blizzard stoked up enough to concentrate on really actually releasing stuff faster instead of just talking about it.

The sudden sharp halt to growth in 2009 may have been for the reasons you think--certainly a piece of it, not arguing that--but it's as likely that the economic hits in 2008/2009 in the US/EU had something to do with it as well. We both know that's really a really complicated thing so there's not much reason to poke at it a lot. I include game age and game culture as well plus I tend to think that later on the resolution of the 'Lich King' piece of the lore caused many to believe that it wouldn't get any better than that and was a good time to get out while the getting was good. Given what happened afterwards, they were right.

The biggest problem for Blizzard now is figuring out how to bring in new customers. Going towards hard core is realistically unlikely to work and I still think the principle barrier to entry in that respect is the sheer cost of getting started. I'd like to see expansions priced at around $30 (US) and a package to get in entirely including the latest expansion be no more ever than $60 (US).

Or maybe it's more simple than that and MMO's are a shrinking niche and there's nothing to be done about it.

Thanks for the reply.

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Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap. When posting try and be in the 10% once in a while. It makes it better for everyone.

Except the game isn't an excel spreadsheet and talk of 'gating', 'progression' and 'catchup' I think ignores a huge qualitative area called player satisfaction, motivation and achievement. All of which are greatly diminished by the type of systems you propose where people obtain all the items you worked hard for in a mere 2 weeks.

The current model is the best of both worlds, you don't have to rerun old raids like in TBC, and you don't have to endlessly farm the same 5 man dungeons like in Cata. Once I'm in all Epics, I don't want to run 5 man dungeons I was completing in blues/greens. Thats not fun, and I could care less about 'catchup'.

"If you look out of the window as a human being, at nature, all of nature is unconditionally and absolutely beautiful wherever it is. Whether it's a jungle. Whether it's a desert. Whether it's the Arctic wastes. Or even your own back garden. The only ugly things you will ever see when you look out of the window are things made by man." - Stephen Fry

My word of advice is to put him on ignore. I learned a couple of weeks ago from his elitist ramblings trying to ruin another game (Wildstar) that he's openly and unashamedly an elitist. This is in his own words, which you have amply seen in this thread, as he has stated that he is better than pretty much everyone else that plays the games and demands that he and those like him be catered to while everyone else be forced to be like them or have nothing. It's like me saying that my money is ruined because someone gave a dollar to a homeless person. I can't enjoy spending it because I see bums getting it for free. Like...really?

Thankfully developers are starting to not listen to people with that opinion anymore and we have things like LFR in the first place. To be honest with you, it's the entire reason why WoW still has my subscription. I left when the dailies were a nightmare after launch to go play Rift, because it is a very good game with a lot of content. I hit my a progression wall on my character pretty quickly and realized that as many side activities they have, it didn't feel like real progression.

Now I can see how in TBC and WotLK that dungeons could fill this void...I even ran them numerous times on my raiding character well into the life of those expansions. Blizzard chose to make their content more efficient (or lazy, however you look at it) and use raids for this purpose. So to be quite fair, being able to come back to WoW every patch and see ALL of the new content makes it feel more worth my $15 than other games. It was the factor that confirmed my decision to resub.

I don't care if there's better loot in normal modes, I wouldn't care if there was a special extra boss each tier, b/c I get to see the story and the encounters, the artwork inside of the raids, and the joy of getting gear (even if it's nowhere close to the level of real raiding). It makes my entire game experience vastly more enjoyable and they have retained a subscription because of it.

Except the game isn't an excel spreadsheet and talk of 'gating', 'progression' and 'catchup' I think ignores a huge qualitative area called player satisfaction, motivation and achievement. All of which are greatly diminished by the type of systems you propose where people obtain all the items you worked hard for in a mere 2 weeks.

The current model is the best of both worlds, you don't have to rerun old raids like in TBC, and you don't have to endlessly farm the same 5 man dungeons like in Cata. Once I'm in all Epics, I don't want to run 5 man dungeons I was completing in blues/greens. Thats not fun, and I could care less about 'catchup'.

They are not dinimished.

Again, when i beat CVivilization on Warlod difficulty, my achievement, motivation and satisfaction is NOT diminished by another one beating it in the easiest difficulty.

When i raid ToT, my achievements, motivation and satisfaction are NOT diminished by someone getting READY to raid ToT faster than i did.

Because, you see, i have fun with MY PLAYING TIME, not with the others playing time wehere i am not even in their group.

The current model SUCKS. You need to rely on a weekly lockout full of RNG that can starve you for MONTHS to be able to play current content.

If you are in full epics, you dont need a catch up. You could care less about catch up, many of us care, because its an important part of the game.

Also, i do like to run 5 man dungeons in epics, i have fun doing so. But they dont develop new content for me.

This new model is the worst shit they have created in a long time, its just as bad if not worse then the Cataclysmic failure. And subs will show that to Blizzard and to you, they are alerady doing so, they lost in the first quarter the same amount than they did in the first Cata quarter.

My word of advice is to put him on ignore. I learned a couple of weeks ago from his elitist ramblings trying to ruin another game (Wildstar) that he's openly and unashamedly an elitist. This is in his own words, which you have amply seen in this thread, as he has stated that he is better than pretty much everyone else that plays the games and demands that he and those like him be catered to while everyone else be forced to be like them or have nothing. It's like me saying that my money is ruined because someone gave a dollar to a homeless person. I can't enjoy spending it because I see bums getting it for free. Like...really?

Thankfully developers are starting to not listen to people with that opinion anymore and we have things like LFR in the first place. To be honest with you, it's the entire reason why WoW still has my subscription. I left when the dailies were a nightmare after launch to go play Rift, because it is a very good game with a lot of content. I hit my a progression wall on my character pretty quickly and realized that as many side activities they have, it didn't feel like real progression.

Now I can see how in TBC and WotLK that dungeons could fill this void...I even ran them numerous times on my raiding character well into the life of those expansions. Blizzard chose to make their content more efficient (or lazy, however you look at it) and use raids for this purpose. So to be quite fair, being able to come back to WoW every patch and see ALL of the new content makes it feel more worth my $15 than other games. It was the factor that confirmed my decision to resub.

I don't care if there's better loot in normal modes, I wouldn't care if there was a special extra boss each tier, b/c I get to see the story and the encounters, the artwork inside of the raids, and the joy of getting gear (even if it's nowhere close to the level of real raiding). It makes my entire game experience vastly more enjoyable and they have retained a subscription because of it.

I'm sure there are tons of other people who feel the same way.

Thanks for that. I can certainly appreciate when people have a difference of opinion, but to flat out call for the removal of a feature because it gives an alternative style of raiding and gearing seems kinda silly. Especially when the "hard mode" LFR gear still would not let you into Hard mode regulars. The gear is like 8-10 points too low, and there are no more upgrade vendors until 5.3 or beyond. Even at that, it is not his call, nor is it the call of any other elitist raider to say I can either join a 25M prog core team and see the content, or I am not allowed to see it at all. Sound a bit like a certain person saying unless you have Blue eyes, blonde hair, and stand 6'4", you are of inferior genetics. Not sure that went well either.

As for the LFR, I know it is not going anywhere. Liking the loot drops or not is irrelevant. I am just glad the feature exists for people who want to play, but might not have 30+ hours a week to spend on a video game. I side with the people and their ability to have options. Whether they exercise those options or not is up to them.

Actually the only other sub based MMO released in the last 5 years or so that could come close to be called a success was Rift, a game that definitely did cater to the hardcore.

There are obviously a lot of factors in sub numbers, but when you look at the subscription graph, its kind of shocking how it just flatlines as soon as wotlk hits after ridiculous growth prior to that. It was not a slow, gradual run off where many things slowly ate away at it. It was a very sharp, sudden halt to the growth. And to me the single biggest difference between wotlk and BC game design was that in many aspects, not just raiding, the game catered much more to casuals, which is why I attribute the decline to that.

Notice the flatline in late 2008 when wotlk was released:

---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 06:27 PM ----------

And you really don't think there is any other likeminded players in the entire world to replace them?

Here's a flaw. LK was released in 2008. They grew by 1 million subscribers without China's help. Wow also shutdown in China for 3 months in 2009. Remember China accounted for over 50% of the subs at this time period.

Subs were slowly bleeding in 2009 as the expansion dragged on. Feb 12th of 2010 and August of 2010 China gets Burning Crusade and Lich King. Subs pick up again.
Cata released in December and returning subs push to 12 million. China is still working on LK. Cata released in July 2011 in China. Subs still looking good.

DS released in December of 2011. Everyone finishes it quickly, subs start to drop off because the next expansion is announced. Subs pop up for a while when MOP is released in 2012 which this graph doesn't show. Being able to retain this many customers after 8 years is unheard of.

It's just not the fact of LFR being made easier. It is the time constraint difference. In TBC/Wrath I could level and Alt and have him Current Tier Raid ready within a week or two, and begin enjoying actual Current Tier Raids on Normal/Heroic modes.

How did you do that in TBC o.O How did you get T5/T6/T6.5 equalent gear in couple weeks?

TBC wasn't hard at all to catch up, Justice Badges gave plenty of Epics at all points during the expac, and so did Isle of Quel'danas. TBC was actually only 2nd to WOTLK for being easy to catch up, It was only during the stages when you needed to down bosses to unlock the new raids which was hard.

Umm. No. Justice badges were effective to catch up when sunwell came out. Not before, and that was limited. Prior to that, it was very difficult to go from the bottom of the raiding totem pole to current content. Hell, you couldn't even get *in* current content for a while unless you'd done the previous bit for a while (see: Tier 6 to Tier 7 transition before they relaxed the conditions so you could skip Kael and Vashj).

Subs were slowly bleeding in 2009 as the expansion dragged on. Feb 12th of 2010 and August of 2010 China gets Burning Crusade and Lich King. Subs pick up again.
Cata released in December and returning subs push to 12 million. China is still working on LK. Cata released in July 2011 in China. Subs still looking good.

What? Subs starting tanking immediately when Cata was released, both in the west (in Q1 and Q2) and in China (in Q3). Subs were not "still looking good".

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.